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Get marked as a safe sender with our subscriber-friendly whitelist instructions

Now that Gmail's new inbox is placing everyone's email on any old tab except the Primary one, we thought it was high time to revisit the classic practice of encouraging subscribers to whitelist your campaigns. By actively asking to have your sender details added to the address book, contacts, or "Safe Senders List", you can up your chances of landing straight in the inbox, being seen and in some cases, have images display by default.

Adding a short whitelisting message to your email content is far from a new idea, however it hasn't lost its lustre - there is merit to actively having your email marked as important, especially in webmail clients. With Gmail in particular assessing the actions of your subscribers as part of their email filtering process, having your emails repeatedly moved to the Primary tab, or having images downloaded by default sends a strong message that your campaigns are indeed valuable.

A step-by-step guide for your subscribers

The most common approach to nudging subscribers into adding your "From" name and email address to their address book (or similar) is to have a friendly prompt, similar to the following:

Linking to a short whitelisting walkthrough featuring a variety of email clients is especially beneficial for less email-savvy subscribers - there may even be some that don't know it's possible to shift messages between tabs in Gmail! So, for both the benefit of senders and recipients alike, we've created visual instructions for the most popular email clients, which you are more than welcome to link to from your email campaigns. They're as up-to-date as they get and we'll be aiming to keep them refreshed as email clients change.

Finally, I hope you find these whitelisting instructions to be useful - we've had a few requests for a step-by-step docs like this, so hopefully they fit the bill. Of course, if you have any suggestions for any other resources that you, or your subscribers would find to be useful, be sure to let us know in the comments below.

Simon - Good call, we considered this, but wanted to see what kind of demand there was first before focusing on a white-label version. One of the catches is that we’d have to host it on a separate domain to maintain the white-labelness of it - not a huge deal, but something for us to think about. Any which way, we’ll keep you posted if this is something we do :)

Matt - Thanks for your feedback here - we might consider redesigning this guide to make it easier to find instructions for specific clients. The good news is that we are looking at making significant changes to our templates in the months ahead, so we’ll keep you posted if we provide a more flexible template for you to use :)